Bible Review, February 1995
Features
Staging Jonah
For a long time, I wanted to write a play about the comic, contentious, absurd, salvific relationship between God and us—to present a comic Everyman locked in mortal (salvific) combat with Yahweh. But I got nowhere with the idea and let it...Read more ›
Altar-Ed States
Incense theory goes up in smoke
Archaeological artifacts do not interpret themselves. Here’s a case in point: Some 40 relatively small altars were found in at least nine sites in Palestine. After most scholars agreed that they were intended for burning incense, they were designated “incense altars.” I...Read more ›
Multiple Judaisms
A new understanding of the context of earliest Christianity
The subject of this article—from Judaism to Judaisms—is not only about names, but about ways of looking at things. For nearly two thousand years both Jews and Christians have looked at Judaism as a single fixed thing—a kind of point. Paradoxically, each...Read more ›
Tracing the Evolution of the Hebrew Bible
What the Dead Sea scrolls teach us
In some ways—oddly enough—the more than 200 biblical manuscripts in Hebrew found among the Dead Sea Scrolls have elevated the authority of the Greek Septuagint at the expense of the Masoretic text, the received Hebrew version preserved by the Jewish community for 2,000 years. Nevertheless, there is...Read more ›